Welcome to Uncorporeality Check!

Welcome to Uncorporeal’s home for occasional musings about virtual reality, augmented reality, reality capture and all new tech that brings the real world into the virtual world.

We’re kicking off our inaugural post with a basic primer–what the heck is reality capture and what does it have to do with those cool VR headsets??

Virtual reality–those immersive environments inside the headset–are created in a couple of ways. Traditionally, they’re created with computer graphics (CG) artists creating digital environments in 3D. The approach is similar to what Pixar or 3D video game companies do. Creating VR experiences with CG requires a lot of human power to create each motion, angle, shadow and visual in a scene–and make them look real from every angle and as they interact with other objects and assets.

Phew!

We focus on a different approach called reality capture.

That means we use video cameras to “capture”–or record–a scene, a person, an object, a dog, you name it, from many different perspectives. Our technology unifies all those varied perspectives in the cloud and delivers usable 3-D content for replay in a VR headset (and eventually on mobile devices). In many cases, those builds let the participant walk around and explore, doing everything from checking out the fiber count on a shirt for sale to exploring nooks and crannies of a haunted house. Creating that level of immersion–that feeling of transportation to somewhere else that feels completely real–is what attracted many of us to VR in the first place.

Our goal: make it easy for anyone, anywhere to capture anything in VR–and make it feel indistinguishable from the real world.

One insight we’ve found is that experiencing real places in VR is quite powerful. We have a build of a staircase above a beach in New Zealand, and while I’ve never been I always feel a sense of awe when I drop in. That sense of place is doubly profound when I’ve visited the place before. Upon “traveling” to the scene in virtual reality, all sorts of feelings of nostalgia and place filter through our brains, leading to a deep sense of amazement.

Welcome to our blog. We plan to use this space as a forum to educate readers about our work and virtual reality more broadly, provide technical perspectives, explore creative applications of our technology and discuss key market trends. In particular, we’re interested in new VR applications for training, storytelling, education and enterprise.